Slashdot Mirror
Too Much Information – Context-Aware Applications
ChelleChelle writes with a link to IBM research on the limits to and lessons learned from two context-aware computing projects:
"As the researchers Moran and Dourish put it, 'Context awareness is fine in theory. The research issue is figuring out how to get it to work in practice.' The article lays out two attempts by IBM to do just this. Grapevine and Rendezvous are services offered to IBM employees as a means of looking into the promise and perils of context-aware computing. From these two experimental services the authors have drawn several valuable lessons." From the article: "What computer scientists commonly call context often has more to do with technology than with work situations, people, or frames of mind."
Dave ... you may want to close your bathrobe before the video conference ...
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
No, no, no, no.
As I commented on the intuitive OS thread or whatever it was called, users (or at least I) don't want an OS that acts unpredictable. I don't want to wait around for hours for a message before finally figuring out that my cell phone decided I didn't want to be reminded of them right then. Consistency is uncompromisable.
Property is theft.
If they answered no to the first and yes to the second, then you'll probably be fine.
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
According to my Blackberry, I've got 5 minutes free next April in which we could discuss possibilities for socializing.
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
"First, users often were not comfortable with others knowing what they were doing. The Grapevine service provided complete control over who could observe which elements of context, and users commonly blocked all others from viewing their computer activity all of the time. Although the service allowed observer-by-observer blocking, it was rarely used. This is an area for further research."
And in further news, the Thought Police reported today that Winston Smith has rented an apartment without a telescreen.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
What they need is some sort of motion sensor that detects when the case is jostled, so I can provide feedback to the program in the form of a swift steel-toed boot to the DVD-ROM/drink holder. That'll give it some "context".
My subject says nothing. That's because "context" these days has become a catch-all buzzword for people in the technology industry and academic circles to try to abstract a very complex entity away to focus on some specific detail. Although this sometimes works, it only works when you the specific detail or thing you want to discuss, observe, or code can realistically be isolated from all those complexities you just swept away by calling them 'context'.
:)
The trouble is, when you say you want something to be 'context-aware' you are saying you want it to be aware of all the complexity. Software cannot do this. You want to create something can run on your computer that is more aware than a human is and not just aware in the data sense of facts and trivia, nor simply in the analytical sense of adding facts to facts and substracting trivia. What you want is intuitive awareness and this is the one thing you cannot have in software and systems of the complexity available today (it remains to be seen if it can ever be gained through deterministic computation - the rote addings and subtractings of on and off states or, if it can be found, if it will collapse what was previously thought of as intuition into merely imperfect analysis that would only be acceptable for a human to conclude).
So what am I saying? I'm saying that "context awareness" is just a buzzword for a de facto implausibility. I point you to this quote from the article: "While people clearly do these things today without additional help from context-aware services, the goals of such services are to allow people to make better communication choices, engage in a richer and more valuable interaction, and waste less time in accomplishing their interactions, while providing significant cost savings to the enterprise."
This is contextual statement. It sweeps all the true complexity away in exchange for semantic complexity. It really says nothing and simply uses 30 or so words where two would do: work better.
Why am I going on about this? Becuase it is intellecutally dishonest to pretend that you can brush away the complexity of the world by calling it context. It leads to pointless research projects where aggregations are made, imperfectly, from imperfect information when it could already be obviously judged from the outset that they would ultimately not scale to complexity at hand. It results in 'Xanadu' projects that will forever be stuck in a state of being 'so close' to being useful, but never actually becoming so. There are more concrete things we can attack, things were we can make actual statements rather than vague and amorphous statements about what a system might theoretically do. It's just a matter of rolling up the sleeves and doing some work instead of engaging in intellectual laziness and then wasting other people's time with our frivolities.
Which is all to say that I found the article and information contained therein not worth the time of reading.
Can somebody give me a better breakdown explanation? I read TFA, but couldn't gather it's meaning from the context. Damn this non-context aware application...
"But this one goes to 11!"